Willie Wells

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I guess point is that whatever Moore's and Wells' reputation (whatever people say about them) is qualitative evidence. The quantitative evidence that is available to us supports Moore's reputation by way of demonstrating a great peak. It supports Wells' reputation by way of a large accumulation of career value. Whether one prefers Moore or Wells is more a question of peak vs. career rather than a question of which was "better" in any other sense.

Wells looks like he will go into the HoM quickly. Moore has been hanging around for a long time now. Of course Moore's real problem is not getting proper credit for his time with the Wreckers (though that helps), it is that broken leg. But if a strong peak appeals to you, then Moore and Wells are not far apart.

IOW I don't mean to denigrate Wells. Rather I'm trying to drum up some more support for Dobie because he looks to be so close to Wells, if you factor in his peak value.

While it appears that this era in the NgLs was more competitive, that's somewhat of an illusion. There remained 10-16 teams worth of NgL players out there, in the NgL's player universe, waiting to be plucked. In many cases, those players remained with teams that have no historical record in the period. Or very little.

It would be as though the NL closed up shop, but three or four of its teams kept chooglin' along as indie teams without league schedules.

A very good example comes in the form of the KC Monarchs who have almost no data from 1932-1936, yet we know that they existed and retained a number of their star players (Andy Cooper for instance).

My guess is that the remaining "league" teams in the 1932-1936 (that is any playing in any kind of confederation) were very likely not acquiring talent in the most efficient way (because of the near-constant changing of circumstances in the period, I'm guessing talent was released and acquired as catch could), which would mean that despite contracting, these teams were not absolutely the cream, though they might appear to be.

If my supposition is true, then, yes, we need to adjust the translations so that they take this conccept into account.

The only two teams I know of that were indie teams but retained a significant number of top players are the Monarchs and the NY Black Yankees. The Yankees have some documentation -- it varies from season to season -- so often they can be counted, even though they weren't a "league" team. Are there any others I'm overlooking? The effect of contraction can be overstated, but the I still think a contraction from about 16 teams to about 10 teams took place, which is a significant drop.

But uncertainty about exactly what contraction meant for the level of competition is what keeps me from attempting to calculate a different conversion factor, though a different one should be applied, if only we knew what it was.

Willie Wells, in my WARP, using Cobb MLE's and assuming league-average baserunning. I imagine anyone who would pay attention to this chart is familiar with what these numbers are by now. These are after accounting for standard deviations.